by K. Gorman
Soo-jin turned and drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, Mara.” She pocketed her blaster and raised her hands, taking a few steps forward. “Sweetie, come here.”
Karin’s throat tensed at the look in Soo-jin’s eyes.
Marc took a quick peek, glanced at the door, then back. He pointed to a chair. “Tie her down. We’ll get her on the way back.”
“I know, I know.” Soo-jin’s breath caught as she hugged the black-eyed woman, a tear rolling down her cheek. Then her jacket rustled as she pulled out another roll of tape. “Come here, honey. Just sit awhile.”
Mara followed Soo-jin’s lead, hesitant but complacent. Her fingers wound around the arm of the computer chair as she lowered herself down, Soo-jin holding it steady.
“Gods,” Soo-jin said when they left her there, ripping off a piece of tape for the door. “God and gods and all the fucking saints in between.”
“It’ll be all right,” Marc said. “Karin will heal her. We can’t leave her unconscious like you were, or another one might—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Soo-jin blew out a breath. “That doesn’t stop it from sucking. I just tied my aunt to a chair and left her in a dark room.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure I’ll be much fun for company anytime soon.”
“I don’t think now is the time for that,” he said. “And I’m sure Mara will thank you for this after, chair tie and all.” He glanced up. “Come on. Let’s keep moving. She’ll be all right. You want me to tape this one?” He held out a hand.
“No, I got it.” Soo-jin moved toward the door. “It’s the Mess hall next. Maybe they’ll have something we can snack on.”
They moved on. On the walls, shadows flinched and warped as they walked through the corridors. A chill brushed against the back of her arm from an overhead vent.
But it was just a draft, stirred down the hall by the setting of the sun. Nothing jumped out of them.
They pushed open the double-doors to the Mess hall, guns raised. The blackened eyes of ten Lost turned their way.
Soo-jin’s breath caught. Then she and Marc funneled into the room and turned in opposite directions, pointing the barrel of their guns and the beams of their flashlights into every corner, nook, and cranny.
“Clear,” Marc said, a little breathless. Was it starting to get to him, too?
Soo-jin dropped her gun back into her holster and rushed forward. “Gods, guys, what happened to you? Loras? Mitch?”
She went from person to person. A few of the Lost started to follow after her, like tamed goats.
Ethan’s arm brushed into Karin’s side. She put a hand down, found his shoulder, and gave it a squeeze. “How you holding up?”
He shivered. “This place is creepy. Is this where you were planning on leaving me?”
“It’s a good place,” she said. “Just not right now. We’re going to fix it.”
“Can you really?” he asked. “Fix them all?”
She felt his head turn up to look at her, and she peered down to catch his gaze. His green eyes were almost completely dilated, the flashlight outlining them in splashes of light that turned the shadows on his face crooked and sharp. He looked gaunt, scared, suddenly much older. As if he were a teenager who’d been starving, instead of a ten-year-old.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I can.”
“And my father? Can you fix him, too?”
“We’ll go back for him as soon as we take off from here.” Marc grunted as he shoved another chair into a line. There were seven of them now, all in a row.
Tape ripped. As Karin looked up, Soo-jin wrapped the first strip around an older man’s arms, taking care to put it across his sweater instead of his skin. Light skittered around them as they worked, making mixed fragments of shadow skip and jump across the walls and ceiling. She gave Ethan’s shoulder another pat and stepped forward, ready to help.
But, before she’d gotten past the first table, movement shrank back on the wall.
Four silhouettes folded out of the darkest places of the room, standing up as if they’d been there all along.
Her breath caught. “Hey—hey, watch ou—”
Ethan’s scream cut her off. A hand wrapped around her face. Everything went black.
She screamed, lashed out. Her flailing legs rattled a nearby chair as she struck out. A strong force wrapped around her neck and dragged her back. Someone else shouted. One of the tables gave a loud shriek, metal grating on metal. As she scratched at the thing that held her, her fingernails dug several inches into its body.
If the Shadow had felt it, it only made its attack stronger.
It was an impassive force. Strong, unrelenting. The hand on her face felt like a heavy blanket. She gasped as it smothered her nose and mouth. A low ringing started in her ears, growing more and more present with each passing moment.
Air. I need air.
She tried to punch its head, but it caught her hand. Her muscles felt like lead.
Her struggles weakened. Noise slowed around her. She blinked, saw nothing. Parts of her sank into a numbness.
It felt like she was floating. The edges around her eyes turned black. Fingers pressed into her face.
The Shadow had a substance to it. It invaded her mind like a slow radiation. Darkness pushed into her like smoke, floating into every single one of her thoughts and snuffing them out like candles.
She tried to lash out again, to kick it, to wrench herself away from its grip. Pain smacked into the back of her hand as it connected with something.
She redoubled her efforts, kicking, hitting, biting, struggling as much as she could.
Gravity shifted from under her, and her mind did a slow flip. Was she back on the ship? Was this a dream? Had the grav generator malfunctioned again?
Air whooshed across her ears.
She slammed into something hard.
The breath drove out of her lungs. She slid down, gasping like a fish. Pain spiked through her back and echoed into her extremities. But, behind the pain, came the darkness again. It encroached slowly, and where it touched, all feeling left.
She couldn’t hear anything anymore, couldn’t see, couldn’t even feel the rapid gasp of her strangled breath. The smell of rotten food from the kitchen lingered in her nose and mouth, along with the coppery taste of blood.
But soon, even that faded.
The pain, too, left.
Everything turned black.
She struggled against it, but it was no use. It smothered her, irresistible. Even breathing felt long and stuffy, clotted by a blackness so deep, it flowed like velvet against her mind.
She floated down.
A lump formed in her throat as she struggled.
She had one last, desperate thought before everything inside her ceased to exist:
I am going to die here.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I thought I told you to be prepared for this?”
Nomiki’s voice, confident and assured, cut through the darkness like a laser knife.
Karin tried to flicker her eyelids open, but...
She saw nothing.
More than that, she had nothing.
No eyes, no ears, no mouth or nose. Panic strangled her without even a throat to drag in one desperate, gasping breath. Blackness fluxed around her, depthless and unending, pressing in on whatever infinitesimal part of her that remained.
Oh Gods, I’m going to die.
“You’re not dead yet,” Nomiki answered, reading her thoughts. Even without a body, she could sense the knife her sister held in her hand. Nomiki’s voice moved around her. “How greedy it is,” she tutted. “It’s damn well swallowed you whole.”
She paused. Then, suddenly a lot closer, she chuckled in Karin’s ear, close enough, and vivid enough, that her breath tickled Karin’s skin.
“Come on, Rin. You aren’t usually this slow.”
Light flashed in the dark. A slice of pain slashed across her forearm in the exact place Nomiki had cut her before.
It was even darker than the Shadow. Darker than everything inside and outside of her. It closed sharply into itself, forming a distinct symbol: an upside-down egg encircled by an ouroborous, the snake that ate its own tail.
And, beside it, a digitized number: 0126.
Project Eos.
A jolt ran through her. She thrashed. Images of a green-tinted lab slammed sharply across her mind. Doctors. Hospital bed. I.Vs. Injections. The concrete basement of the compound. Other children, like her, getting up from the floor.
“Come on, Rin.” Nomiki chuckled in her ear. “Don’t you remember what we used to do?”
Then she was gone, walking away into the distance.
In her wake, light sparked. It bloomed from her footsteps like fire on oil, floating up, up, up…
Suddenly, Karin could see.
The room was monochromatic. A dancing, flickering play of light and shadow. Noise roared in her ears, unintelligible. For the first few seconds, it felt like she was bridging two worlds—half of her bodiless, sucked into one of shadow that spread up far beyond the meager dimensions of the Songbird’s Mess hall; the other half a numb, leaden body pressed against the smooth linoleum floor of the same Mess hall.
Her skin prickled. The first thing she felt was the bare trace of her breath—air blowing through her throat, her nose, the skin across her knuckles. Her entire body felt punished, pummeled, like it had been beat out like a wet rag.
Her fingers twitched beside her face. Shaking, breath quick and shallow, wincing with pain, she pulled them to her face. She felt her chin and lips, then up to her nose.
When she brought it back, blood tipped the ends of her fingers. But not much.
She licked the inside of her teeth and forced a deeper breath, testing for pain. Then she began to push herself upright.
The room shifted as she moved, and she sucked in a breath at a wave of dizziness. A sharp pain in her back made her stop short. As she propped herself on her elbows, a jolt of static crossed her vision. Sound came as through water—sudden and loud and quick, but its meaning and tone distorted and muted.
As she rested, the scene around her gradually came back into sync.
Marc and Soo-jin were fighting. Their feet stumbled back and forth under the tables. She watched all this at a distance, not quite comprehending. She felt detached, insignificant, a bystander at a show. Light skittered wildly across the room—at least one of them must be using their flashlight as a weapon. Marc’s blaster sat on the floor under one of the tables, several feet from where his legs moved. Shadowed feet, moving less like a human and more like a ghost, harried him.
She squinted and winced, fighting back another wave of dizziness. It proved hard to watch. They weren’t human. They didn’t have dimension. They looked flat—just an empty blackness that took shape and, somehow, form.
But, as she kept on watching, she realized he was fighting two Shadows.
Light shimmered onto her hand like hot blood. She looked down with a frown and stared at it for a second. An echo of Nomiki’s words spoke into her mind.
Come on, Rin. You aren’t usually this slow.
She winced, tensing as another wave of nausea shivered through her. When she pushed herself further upright, the whole room seemed to tilt around her, spinning out of control. The puddle of light blurred in her vision. Her skin tingled beneath it.
Don’t you remember what we used to do?
A cry of pain snapped through the room, louder than the shouts. Soo-jin went down, scrabbling on the floor, visible now under the tables. She skittered back, kicked out as a Shadow bent over her. Its too-long arms reached for her head. Karin heard someone calling her name, screaming it over the noise.
A pressure built behind her head. It felt as though the entire room were pressing in on her, as if time and space were warping around her. More nausea spun through her mind, and a few tears pricked through her eyes. A small part of her was screaming. She could feel the rage, but it was distant—like she was flying a ship above an ocean and was seeing it underwater. Untouchable unless she either went down or it came up.
Come on, Rin. Don’t you remember?
The serpent and the egg flashed in her mind’s eye, sharp and black, then blinding white. Her number, the name of her project.
Eos.
The word sounded as a voice in her head. A jolt of shock snapped through her body. She gasped a breath, pushed herself to her pained feet, staggered forward, and burned everything she could into her power.
Light flooded the room like an atomic blast.
Sound roared into her ears, no longer distant. She fell against something, groped against it, found the hard edge of one of the tables. Light took up everything—as black and complete as the darkness had been before, here was its opposite. White, full of color, brighter than the sun.
Something gave.
Then all sound suddenly cut.
The light began to fade.
It receded slowly, pulling back to her like a tide to its moon, seeping into her skin until all that remained of it settled inside her, making her glow like an incandescent light bulb.
Then that, too, faded.
The room went dead quiet. No one spoke. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, frozen in what they had been doing. Soo-jin breathed hard on the floor. Blood trickled from a cut on her forehead, and she cradled one of her hands close to her stomach. Like Marc’s blaster, her knife had fallen to the floor at some point. It glinted near the leg of another table.
In the backsplash of the closest flashlight, her skin looked lean and pale, almost as white as the walls.
Marc, too, looked pale. He was closer, frozen in mid-fighter’s stance as if unsure whether the fight was over or not. After a second, he stepped back, shook himself, and leaned heavily against the closest table.
By the wall, Ethan hiccuped in fear.
“Where the fuck did they come from?” Soo-jin let out a heavy, ragged breath, then looked around. “Both doors were closed, right?”
“They didn’t come through the doors,” Marc said. “I saw them. They kind of… faded into the room. Like ghosts.”
“Sol’s child,” Soo-jin said. “That was… freaky.”
“Freaky, I think, is an understatement,” he said.
“Yeah, but I’ve already sworn once around Ethan today, and I’m kind of at a loss of words here.”
“That would be a first,” he commented
“Don’t you stereotype me as a woman.”
“I’m not. I’m stereotyping you as you.” He seemed to shake himself. His gaze moved away, searching. It fell on Karin. “You okay?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it as the room spun again. She groped for the table, legs suddenly unsteady. “I think I need to sit down.”
As she sank into the closest chair, a soft scuff of a shoe pulled her attention to the side. One of the room’s Lost, a boy who looked roughly twelve, stepped into her range of sight. Black eyes looked down at her.
Then, suddenly, both of them were bathed in light. A small voice trembled from the wall.
“She had black eyes,” Ethan said. “I saw them.”
The whole room went silent. Everyone stared at her. Marc, too, flicked his light over to her face.
She tried not to squint.
“Well, she doesn’t have them now,” he said. “Let’s assume she’s okay.” He slipped around the table and bent down to retrieve his blaster. “Let’s move on. We should be getting close.”
“They’re in the pantry, actually.” Soo-jin gestured to the kitchen visible through the half-wall. Metal counters gleamed as they turned their lights toward it. Soo-jin’s swept across them and farther in, revealing industrial appliances with pots and pans made for mass cooking. “Shall we?”
Marc looked to her. “Karin?”
She grunted and pushed herself up from the chair, pausing for a second to lean against the tabl
e. The dizziness didn’t seem quite as bad this time. She grabbed her light and followed them to the door. In the corner of her eye, she saw Ethan give her a hard stare, then he slipped up to Marc’s other side, avoiding her questioning gaze.
Hmm. Perhaps her eyes really had been black.
They’d have to consider the meaning of that later. They had people to rescue.
The kitchen was dark and silent, and the smell of old, rotting food crept to her nose. A piece of half-eaten toast lay just inside the counter she passed. A solid door, its color flashing like chocolate in their lights, sat in the opposite wall near the back corner. She leaned on the counter for support, half-limping her way over.
Soo-jin gave three sharp knocks on the pantry door. “Guys? It’s me. We’re here.”
As Karin grew closer, something rustled on the other side of the door. They heard a low murmur of voices.
Then, “Soo?”
Soo-jin shot Marc a sharp look. “Yeah, it’s me. I brought my friends. It’s clear.”
More rustling sounded on the other side. A second later, the lock disengaged. The door swung open a crack, and someone peered out. “Soo? Is that really you?”
She didn’t even need to speak. The man’s face crumpled as soon as recognition hit. The door opened wider. Soo-jin stepped forward and pulled the broken man into her arms. He sobbed quietly into her shoulder.
“It’s okay, Gramps,” she said softly. “We’re going to get you out.”
“They came so fast—I never even thought… there wasn’t any time…”
“It’s alright. We’re here now. It’s not your fault. It’s going to be okay.”
Several others peered at them from inside the room, their faces pale with sweat, and scared. The thick odor of urine and feces drifted out the door.
“Come on, let’s get you out of here.” Soo-jin pulled the man outside and beckoned to the others.
But he jerked back as if he’d been bitten. “Soo, the others… They—”
“Shh. It’s okay.” She pointed him toward Karin, gesturing with her arm. “You see this woman? She’s going to heal all of them. Come on. Let’s go round them up.”
“They’ve made a cure?” His eyes flicked to Karin. “Oh, thank the gods.”
